More is not always better
Blu-ray boasts a fantastic video experience with eye popping 1920×1080 resolution, up to 40Mbps throughput and uncompressed audio. How can anyone snub those specs? Well it would seem the average consumer is unimpressed, take for example the uncompressed audio, every time I get into a Blu-ray debate uncompressed audio is one of the main talking points, fantastic studio perfect sound can’t be bad can it? Well no but it also is not necessarily good, take for example MP3, a heavily compressed audio format that the majority of consumers have accepted as standard and easily acceptable for listening to all their music, even DVD audio is highly superior to MP3. So the question becomes: Can people tell the difference between MP3, DVD and uncompressed, and more importantly do they care?

I can safely say I for one do not. As someone with a competent audio setup with a dedicated amp and floor standing speakers MP3 is fine, DVD is fine and personally even though I’m a bit of an audiophile I’m pretty sure I would not be able to tell the difference between uncompressed and DVD. Scale that across the market and most people use only their TV’s built in speakers and I guarantee whilst I’m not a massive audiophile my auditory standards are quite far above the norm.

Next on the chopping board is the high res visuals and I’m going to fill you in on a little background first, I used to rent a room from someone and had my own 32″ HDTV wall mounted right above my computer which meant I was always sat no more than 2 feet away from it and usually less. This allowed me to experience some really stunning visuals from HD videos and I was hooked. Skip ahead a year or two and I move into a house of my own, the same 32″ TV is sat in the large living room and my viewing distance is increased to something like 6 feet. HD becomes less wow and I start thinking that maybe I need a bigger TV. At about 6 feet away from my 32″ HD still looks good but it doesn’t look “great”.

And now it comes down to justification, is the improved picture worth the extra I will have to put down for a Blu-ray player and the Blu-ray discs? For me again this is a no, sure if I had a bigger TV with 1080p suppport it might be a different story but there lies the issue with market acceptance. Although more and more people are buying HD sets there are still a great many people (I would wager a vast majority) who still have SD sets or 720p sets and have them set up in their living room sitting a good 6 or so feet away. Yet again I am a bit of an elitist when it comes to video, I loathe watching badly transferred DVDs and DIVX copies of my DVDs are just not the same! But still to me, the visual elitist I find it hard to justify shelling out for something that is marginally improving my viewing experience and will only cost me more in the long run for discs.

Versus DVD
DVD is still the biggest physical medium for video and it still has a lot to offer in the age of High Definition and Blu-ray, the biggest selling point for DVD is it’s price. Economies of scale mean that DVDs are cheaper and easier to buy than ever but Blu-ray is still more expensive making Blu-ray more of an indulgence. So what are the compelling reasons to indulge?

Well the video and audio has been discussed above and they apply equally to DVD. But there is another dimension to DVD which narrows the gap and that is up-scaling, DVDs have a lot of untapped bitrate squeezed in there and DVD is the perfect candidate for reprocessing to HD resolutions. Anyone who has an Xbox can tell you of the fantastic job it does of up-scaling DVDs, personally I can’t live without my 360, it makes DVDs look so crisp and clear and gives them quality approaching HD. This is another barrier in the adoption of Blu-ray, DVDs for me still look fantastic when up-scaled and narrow that important gap of how much better Blu-ray actually looks. Again for me on my 32″ that far away the difference between DVD and Blu-ray is getting even more minimal.

The competition
Here is the real clincher for me and probably the most important hurdle for Blu-ray to overcome, yes Blu-ray saw of HD-DVD as a competitor but though this might have seemed as the battle won it is only the beginning of the fight for Blu-ray. Since DVD was launched the market has been changing rapidly and adopting less conventional means of getting their media. Itunes alone has shifted over ten billion songs and are now offering HD content without the need for any hardware. The Xbox 360 is in 35 million homes and offers on demand 1080p streaming of the latest movies, not to mention the multitude of cable, satellite and terrestrial HD mediums.

Do people really want to go out and buy a brand new Blu-ray player for ~£100 and then buy physical media for £15 a pop when they can use their existing games console, PC or television provider to stream those movies for a third of the price. In today’s on demand culture I think people are questioning how often they actually watch the DVDs they buy and for some it may only be once or twice anyway and when you have the choice to be able to watch that movie at any time without having to pop out to the shops it becomes a much easier sell. Of course for those that watch films over and over again, or just love to watch them a lot Blu-ray may be a good choice for now.

Conclusion
I didn’t think I would need a whole conclusion section but I have rattled on for so long I think I need to wrap things up. Taking all of the above into account for me it is hard to justify investing in Blu-ray in the near future or maybe ever, HD streaming is only going to become more popular and the vendors are only going to multiply. This coupled with the negligible advantages Blu-ray offers leads me to think that Blu-ray will never reach the saturation of DVD or will ever gain true market acceptance as a mainstream product and maybe make in a niche for videophiles.

Let me know what you think.

As you can see it lists the wifi access points in range with the signal strength and handy things like the time it was last seen and most importantly the channel the network is operating on. The most useful parts for me though are the graphs at the bottom, the left one shows the signal strength over time, which is useful if you want to track what may be interfering with your signal. The right graphs just shows a visual representation of where the different channels are and where the networks around you are broadcasting, this is very useful in determining which channel you should be broadcasting on to get the least interference from other networks.

All in all it’s a small and useful package and you can download it here.

This is aimed at those who build or fix PCs, their own or others. I would like to know what your hardware failures have been so we know which brands are doing well and which components people should avoid. I will be collating at least two lists; One for top product failures and the other for top components that fail.

All you have to do is post a comment on this article with the hardware failures you have experienced along with the make of the devices that failed (no registration required), I’ll post the first one below so you know what to expect. Use a real email address so I can get back to you if you win and arrange the prize to be sent out. Please limit the failures to a maximum of 10.

The competition will run for at least 1 – 2 weeks (depending on how many people respond) but feel free to add your failures even after the prize has been claimed.

There are a few stipulations to this contest;
» I will only ship the prize to the UK, USA and most of Europe.
» You must detail at least one piece of hardware including the manufacturer.
» I need to get at least 100 people to respond to get anything meaningful, so if you can spread the word about the “competition” that would be great. Therefore;
» The winner cannot be announced until there are at least 100 respondents.

Good luck everyone and look out for the results.

Sticking with the folding@home client for now, currently there are around 20,000 GPU clients ‘folding’ producing around 2 Petaflops (2000 Teraflops) and we’ll assume for arguments sake that the average folder’s PC cost around £500, which is a little high as one can make a system capable of running the client for quite a bit less and I’m not counting montiors etc, but we’ll assume and average gamer. 20,000 x £500 = £10,000,000. Each Blue Gene/L (one of the top supercomputers around) hits around 6 Teraflops per rack each rack consisting of 1,024 dual core PowerPC based processors and cost (2004 data) around £1,000,000 each. Matching the price of the GPU folders Blue Gene/L racks thats only 10 racks pumping out 60 Teraflops, further; to reach 60 Teraflops with GPU folding the cost is around £300,000.

More to come on this, some of us have to sleep.